Couple's earthen cottage is born from a desire to simplify life

CECELIA GOODNO, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By CECELIA GOODNOW, P-I REPORTER

Updated 10:00 pm, Friday, October 5, 2007

Cate Buck reads in the living room of her cozy, 560-square-foot cob house. Cob is an adobelike mix of clay, sand and straw that traditionally is formed by hand into curvy, sinuous shapes. The building method is making a comeback among green-minded consumers.
Photo: Dan DeLong/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Cate Buck reads in the living room of her cozy, 560-square-foot cob...

Curved, free-form walls on the exterior of Cate and Warren Buck's cob house near Monroe give it an organic feel.
Photo: Dan DeLong/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Until a few years ago, Cate Buck had her feet firmly planted on the corporate treadmill, pulling down $200,000 a year as the CEO of a law firm. Then the law firm dissolved, and, coincidentally, so did her marriage.

So she rebuilt her life from the ground up -- trading a 3,000-square-foot house with big-screen TV for a 560-square-foot mud cottage made by hand.

Believed to be one of the first "cob" houses in Washington to win a building permit, it recently was appraised for at least a quarter-million dollars, Buck said.

With its conical tin roof and thick, rounded walls the color of gingerbread, it's a home Frodo Baggins might envy. Yet this whimsical cottage sits proudly atop a knoll in a leafy community of conventional homes in suburban Snohomish County.

Cob, an English word that means "lump," is an adobelike mix of clay, sand and straw that traditionally is built by hand in curvy, sinuous shapes.

The antithesis of the highly standardized building materials that define most American homes, cob is beginning to make a comeback among green-minded consumers who want their homes, like their food, as unprocessed as possible.

"It's palatial," she said. "It has two 9-foot couches, and my dining area seats eight people."

Elbow room is a bit scarcer since her remarriage last year, but her husband has proved an enthusiastic partner in the project. And he's certainly no hippie.

An internationally known theoretical physicist, Warren Buck, 61, was chancellor of the University of Washington's Bothell campus from 1999 to 2005, its formative years. He took a one-year sabbatical to travel, paint and work on the cob house and now teaches physics at the UW's main campus in Seattle.

"I fell in love with Cate, and this was her brainchild," he said. "She wanted a house that was like the old woman who lived in a shoe. I saw it and thought, 'God, this is a great place.' "

Earthen structures still house roughly half the world's population, and cob enthusiasts say ancient examples of the material, from pre-Columbian ruins to the Great Wall of China, still stand.

"In Great Britain, there are more than half a million cob houses that are still being lived in, and many of them are over 500 years old," said Jack Stephens, who co-founded the Oregon-based Natural Building Network in 2005.

Straw bale is one of the best-known natural building materials but there are many others, such as wattle and daub and "rammed earth," built inside temporary forms. Though decidedly alternative, the field is rapidly gaining converts.

"It seems every day we're getting calls from people. At this point, there aren't enough people trained."

Old-fashioned style

Hand-formed cob is perhaps the most primal of natural building methods, and it's "definitely coming into its own right now," said Jayson Boreen, the professional builder who erected the Bucks' cob home.

"It's doing the same thing straw bale did 10 or 15 years ago," Boreen said. "It's not reserved for alternative, hippie folk anymore."

From inside, the thick plastered walls and built-in benches suggest the protective embrace of a den. Sunlight filters through a wall of colored glass.

The cottage is filled with details that enhance the organic, earthy feel: recycled windows, bas-relief plaster artwork and a bedroom loft with a fanciful driftwood railing.

Snug as it is, the Bucks say they manage to carve out personal space.

"A lot of times," Cate said, "Warren will be on one side of the couch (working) on his laptop and I'll be on the other end doing schoolwork or my business."

With its hobbit-like charm, the curvy cottage is a departure for the Bucks' neighborhood, a 32-acre, heavily wooded cohousing development called Sharingwood, situated between Woodinville and Monroe.

Neighbors endorsed the project after viewing a four-hour slide show by Welsh-born Ianto Evans, widely considered the father of the international cob-building renaissance.

Co-author of "The Hand-Sculpted House," Evans founded the Cob Cottage Co. in Coquille, Ore., in 1993 to spread cob-building technique. Since then, thousands of cob structures have sprung up in North America and elsewhere.

"We take people assuming they've never hung a shelf," Evans said. "Quite astonishingly to me, people go away and build a house."

Plain or fancy

Do-it-yourself cob cottages take relatively little skill and cost next to nothing, but the work is slow, messy and physically demanding. So Cate hired Boreen, an alternative builder who lives in a 600-square-foot house he made from packing pallets, beach wood, wattle-and-daub and rammed earth.

For the Buck house, he proposed a timber-frame design in-filled with non-bearing cob walls. Two sections are cob-plastered straw bale.

"Cate and I sat down with a bunch of modeling clay," Boreen said, "and we actually 'built' her house together."

As if the venture weren't challenging enough, Cate decided to forgo wiring and plumbing, replicating the simple life her mother had growing up in Tennessee.

Buck installed a composting toilet, but no shower or bath, and hauled water 200 feet from a spigot to wash dishes. Her only heater was a leaky wood stove that left her shivering at night.

Eventually, she concluded that "pioneering life is not workable for me."

When Warren entered the picture a couple of years ago, he retrofitted the house with plumbing and wiring and replaced the wood stove with a remote-controlled gas stove that keeps things toasty.

Now Cate jokes, "We have a high-tech mud hut. It has high-speed Internet and all the utilities."

Expansion plans

The retrofit increased the cottage's cost by about 50 percent, to $150,000 -- including $17,000 for a septic system. Cob itself may be dirt cheap, but hired labor eliminates any savings over conventional building.

"You just get a better-quality house," said Evans, the cob revivalist from Oregon. "It's going to last about 30 times as long. It's fireproof, it won't rot, bugs won't eat it."

The Bucks got a building permit retroactively, after the county red-tagged the house. While building codes are the bane of alternative builders, the Bucks' final inspection resulted in only a few last-minute fixes.

"The Snohomish County people -- all of them -- have been so helpful," Cate said. "They helped us figure out really creative ways to meet code."

Building official Mike McCrary said the couple was able to satisfy safety and energy concerns under a code provision that allows for "alternative materials, design and methods."

"The whole process," he said, "was very, very smooth."

Much as they love their tiny cottage, the Bucks already are thinking of adding on a few hundred square feet. Cate, who does laundry at a neighbor's house, misses having a washer and dryer. Warren could use an office and an art studio. And they both want room for visiting friends and family.

"My mom is 84," Cate said, "and I'd like for her to be able to stay from time to time."

What they don't miss is the ball and chain of a large mortgage.

"The really big plus," said Warren, "is we don't have to keep some really tough, demanding jobs just to pay for a house."